Recap: Newsletter Marketing Summit Y2

👋 Hi friends -

Welcome to The Newsletter Growth Memo. Twice a month, I share short reflections with my newsletter clients + other operators.

Zero formality, ads, or affiliate links - just a guy sharing learnings from working with media operators doing $25k-$2M+ / month with newsletters.

New reader highlights: Hiral, Founder @ Stockearnings.com | John, Director of Revenue Operations @ Radiant Digital | Ian, Co-founder @ Ad Astra

New Media Summit Year 2 is in the history books.

Thank you to everyone who came up to say hi during the conference and to the folks who very kindly mentioned The Feed Media on stage.

As usual, I wanted to give you my top takeaways from the event. Enjoy!

Many of you reading this spend 90% of your time cutting CPL rather than building a funnel that enables you to pay MORE per customer.

Is it a coincidence that all of the wealthiest operators in the room have WAY higher LTV than your average newsletter?

Matt Paulson will do $60-65M this year. His session was easily the most tactical of the conference for me.

A few gems:

This was Erika Burghardt’s #1 lesson from leading 1440’s growth.

Meta's new algorithm, Andromeda, has meant several changes in how they test and scale (peek at 1440’s ad account here)…

1/ Dramatically simplify your campaign structure

Utilize a single campaign with 1 scaling ad set and use all other ad sets for testing. Always use broad targeting (throw out your interest groups).

2/ Creative is the new targeting.

Build each ad set around a specific persona.

For 1440, that might mean one ad set focuses on how 1440 makes you the most informed person in the room and a separate ad set on Zuckerberg controlling your news feed.

The algorithm reads your copy and matches it to the right people. The more specific you are, the better.

3/ Value rules give you broad targeting with guardrails.

1440 bids down on 65+ and bids up on Instagram placements (higher LTV subscribers).

You stay broad, but put light constraints on who you want most.

Three speakers confirmed this independently.

Emily Sharpe at Faredrop. Erika at 1440. Dan Krenitsyn @ beehiiv.

Text over video. UGC. Before and after.

I wrote a full newsletter on the top-performing newsletter ads - read it here.

Emily put it well: if it looks like there's too much text, great.

Someone willing to sit and read a dense ad is probably willing to sit and read your newsletter.

Dan's most interesting unlock back when he ran growth at The Information was that, in the early days, they stopped running ads from the publication's account and started running them from individual reporters.

CPLs dropped because people follow people, not brands. Lesson in there!

I haven't seen the traditional ‘free newsletter’ funnel on Meta work well for paid subscription newsletters.

Tangle is a prime example - they didn’t publicly say their Meta CVR, but it was clear that funnel is challenging (to be clear, they are a great business and have other channels working!).

We’ve seen the numbers behind a dozen paid subscription brands. I’ve seen 4 things work to scale:

Direct to paid campaigns - skipping the free list entirely and sending ad traffic straight to the paywall. Hard! But possible.

Buy subscribers in other newsletters - High intent, warm audience, better quality than cold Meta traffic. Underutilized.

B2B qualified lead funnels - Run a sign-up survey to understand exactly who your subscriber is - job title, company type - and qualify them upon sign up. Then conversion becomes a when not an if, plus B2B tends to have higher LTV ($200-400/year).

Be famous - no tactics here, just giving you the full list of what converts. We work with some famous people. Their free readers from Meta become buyers.

I’m bullish on IRL.

Sam Parr spoke about Hampton (I’m a member - it’s really cool!).

People know Hampton because Sam is really popular, but there are dozens of awesome communities and event-based newsletters like what Justin Gordon (The LA Grind) and Andrew Yeung (Fibe) are building.

I already wrote an entire newsletter on communities, so instead I will leave you with some community photos!

It was Matt McGarry’s (host of the conference) birthday the final night of NMS.

So his team and I took him out on the town.

Matt and I did the dougie together at this bar! Was that on your bingo card?

I love hanging out with young hustlers.

My friend Zain and I ended up at a dinner party on Friday with a group of guys doing $20k-100k/month in their twenties who all got a house together in Austin.

These guys are doing it right - proximity is power!

I'm going on 6 adventures this year.

Adventure #2 was visiting my buddy Isaac French in Homestead Heritage, his community north of Austin.

Isaac is one of the most incredible product people I know. He builds art in nature.

I stayed in The Nook - a personal office / guest house he built on his property.

Everything you see here was custom designed by Isaac.

I had espresso with his neighbors’ cows before I headed home to NYC.

That's the letter.

- Nathan